In that case I think I’m safe to wrap this up right in time.
Thanks to all who took part in this week’s challenge. Tricky as always to judge many good clues. I liked the well disguised straight anagrams from Tyke@5 and Paul@12/18 and Geeker@19/25.
Impressed Buddy knew the Charles reference (see the prizes!).
Although I liked the carb + uncle construction, I wasn’t convinced that pasta and sugar were direct synonyms for carb without a ‘perhaps’ etc. I did like Paul’s “boil pasta” and Aristo’s “sugar daddy” though!
Geeker’s hidden@16, Dorrien’s “car B” @23 and Mattrom’s Spoonerism @21 were all fun. Mattrom’s 18 was so close but as you pointed out the substitution doesn’t quite work.
Paul@14’s clever construction with ‘old peasant’ for ‘carl’ and ‘mullah’ for ‘bunch’ was close to winning as I liked the obscurities but in the end I wasn’t convinced by the ‘in’. Small detail I know, but in the end it matters not as I’ve gone with another safe clue from Paul…
Bruce clan fighting over gemstone (9)
Congratulations Paul, here are your many and varied prizes…
“Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood”
King Lear to his daughter Goneril who later kills herself.
Some bedtime reading, an American tale…
https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Hawthorne_Carbuncle.pdf
Garnet
https://youtu.be/2HkEPo_26jg
Sherlock Holmes and The Blue Carbuncle. This is rather long so please don’t feel obliged to watch it all, but the (disappointingly small) gemstone appears at about 15:30. Ryder, the villain of the piece who appears later, is played by James Beck, who we all know as Private Walker in Dad’s Army.
https://youtu.be/eAPWPDL9aMU
Charles on the subject of carbuncles…
https://youtu.be/UOEQLkg5Xlk
…and the Spitting Image version!
https://youtu.be/HtgG_mI3gNo
And finally Simon and Garfunkel (Garfunkel is a Yiddish derivation of carbuncle, relating to the gemstone meaning, who knew?!)
https://youtu.be/NAEppFUWLfc
Cheers all!